As we were in the midst of the housing bubble and the era of highly inflated stock prices, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, a most dour sort, in a speech on the economy referred to the danger of over-inflated values with the term, “irrational exuberance.”  Overly exuberant realtors and brokers were behaving in a most irrational way.  He was saying, “Let’s tamp it down, folks.”  Was he just being another “Debbie Downer?”  Or was he aware of something that those in the housing market and those on Wall Street didn’t know?

Well!   We all know what happened, when in 2008 our irrational exuberance caught up with us and the economy came crashing down about our ears.  In the blink of an eye, trillions of dollars of wealth was destroyed.  As usual, those suffering most were the poor and communities of color.  An entire mélange of bad actors was a part of the disaster.  Banks selling “liar mortgages,” buyers inflating their incomes, bond rating organizations inflating the value of worthless, bundled mortgages – triple A investment grade, my donkey!  You remember those NINJA loans?   No Income.  No Job. No Assets.  And certainly, no cop on the beat.  It was the worst of wild west economics. 

We certainly learned to be afraid of “irrational exuberance.”  And this goes for the church as well.  I’ve often counted on the church treasurer being our “Debbie Downer,” when it came to putting the budget together.  Let’s just play it safe and hoard up what little there is.  You never know!

In the gospel reading, Judas, the church treasurer, is shocked at Mary’s Irrational Exuberance as she pours a most costly ointment all over Jesus’ feet.  “My God, women!  What are you doing?  Don’t you realize that stuff is worth thousands of dollars an ounce?  Have a care!  We could have sold it and raised the money for the poor and needy.”  Judas has a point – not that Judas gave a fig about the poor and needy.  He only wanted the money for himself, the greedy wretch.  But one has to admit, what he counsels is sound economics.  You never know when a rainy day is coming.

Mary, on the other hand, is overcome by the joy of the Lord’s presence.  It just bubbles up out of her uncontrollably.  The words of Isaiah ring through her soul, “The Lord has done great things for us, and we rejoiced.” 

Remember how David Letterman used to boast, tongue-in-cheek, about his comedic ability, “Genius has no ‘off’ switch.”  Well that goes double for the abundance of God’s grace.  There is no “off switch.”  It’s all irrational exuberance.  All the time, twenty-four/seven.

It is the same irrational exuberance embodied in Isaiah’s proclamation, “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream.  Our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy.”  This is Mary as she wipes the ointment from Jesus’ feet with her hair.  Certainly not something done in polite company.  Definitely not done in an Episcopal church!

But our faith is a celebratory faith.  No Debbie Downers allowed.  So, bring on the irrational exuberance, or at least some modified exuberance.  Something we might call Hope.

I remember our early experiences as foster parents.  We had taken in charge the oldest daughter of close church friends.  The parents had divorced and the dad, being an alcoholic, showed no interest in supporting their five children.  We, being young and idealistic – read ‘stupid’ — took the oldest daughter, the child that caused the mother the most grief, and another family in the church, an older couple, took a very compliant younger boy.  Our two families agreed to care for the children for a year, giving the mother time to get her bearings.  The father was as useless as the proverbial bump on a log.

Well, to say that Nikki was a handful was an understatement.  Nikki had flunked nearly every single one of her courses in her freshman year of high school save one.  She got a “D-“ in PE.

She was sixteen going on twenty-four and her motto was, “If you’ve got it, flaunt it.”  We had to devise a dress code for school and church.  Her belly button could not be exposed at church and she could only wear clothing which exposed it at school once a week – hey, we were young and thought this a reasonable compromise.

Nikki assured us that her time with us would be an opportunity to start all over again.  We had high hopes she might find an outlet in some wholesome school club or in band.  Anything!  But it only took Nikki two weeks to find another new set of scuzzy friends, mostly boys up to no good.

We had told her that we wouldn’t be micro managing her school work.  It was up to her.  Unless we found out that her approach wasn’t working.  Well, it was by mid-semester that a flurry of purple notices began arriving in the mail.  Nikki was again headed for failure.  Homework was not turned in.  Test grades were abysmal, and unbeknown to us, she had begun skipping class. 

All this culminated with a meeting at the county courthouse with the probation officer – did I mention that Nikki had been on probation for stealing her boyfriend’s car.  Yes, at sixteen this was her claim to fame.  In a snit she took her boyfriend’s car, and he had reported it stolen.  So, there we were in the probation department office with the P.O. and the school vice principal for attendance, a Mr. Fackrat – you can imagine what the kids called him?  I definitely would have changed my name!

The law was laid down to Nikki.  If she cut one more class she would be going back to juvie.  I looked her in the eye and told her, that if she ended back in juvie, don’t call us.  We would figure that this is where she wanted to be.  There was a long silence in the room.  Slowly, Nikki nodded.  She had gotten the message loud and clear.

Now it wasn’t clear sailing after that, but Nikki never cut another hour of class.  Not only that, when the grades came out at the end of the semester, she had received an “A” in art.  It was the first “A” she had ever received in her entire life.  There was great rejoicing in our house.  A time for irrational exuberance if there ever was one.  Nikki was the most surprised of all.  And so were we.

At the end of her time with us, one of Jai’s friends had asked her how we thought we had done as foster parents.  Jai said that we thought we had done pretty well.  Nikki had had a “C” average in school.  She wasn’t on drugs – other than her cigarettes.  She wasn’t pregnant and she didn’t have anymore run-ins with the probation department or school authorities.  Pretty good, indeed!  Oh, yes – this was also my first church appointment.  What a year.

We and Millie and Ray, the other couple, with trepidation did what any church family would do.  We, in irrational exuberance, took Nikki’s family into the embrace of our arms and loved them.  In real and tangible ways.  It was most irrational, and had we been older we might not have been so exuberant.  We might have considered the real and unlikely possibility of success.  We might have put our treasurer’s green eyeshade on our generous impulse.  We might have just turned our backs and hoped that Nikki and the others might have had a good life – somehow.  Somewhere.

In the real world, the human results of God’s grace range from astounding to pretty good to sometimes, barely passable.  At a party in Lazarus’s house – you remember the guy Jesus brought out of the tomb, living, back alive again?  And now here at a feast for him, with Jesus present?  Certainly cause for irrational exuberance.  Grace with no “off switch.”  And, yet, John’s gospel places this story as a foretelling of Jesus’ last days in Jerusalem. All coming to a bad end on a Good Friday.

Out of that ignominious death on a cross, God’s grace triumphed in the raising up of the Church – the Body of Christ in the world.  That is the Easter Story – as someone wrote, “The Greatest Story Ever Told.”  That is our story.  Cause for irrational exuberance.  Or at least a bit of modified hope.

Last Sunday, after coffee fellowship, several of us took packets of California poppy seeds and with abandon spread them around our statue of St. Francis.  Not having the budget for water or for a full-time gardener, most of the front yard of the church has gone to weeds.  Yet in the midst of it all, we spread seeds of hope.  Seeds, we trust, will be an offering of beauty.  In, dare I say, irrational exuberance, we went out sowing in faith that a carpet of beautiful golden flowers will be a fitting sign of new Easter life here at St. Francis.

And new life does abound, right here in San Bernardino City.  We have several of our members signed up for Cursillo.  To boot, the Rectora of the whole shebang is one of our own.  We have a volunteer who has agreed to head up our proposed food pantry.  We have received a generous giant from the diocese to install a shower for the homeless.  And I have a newly refurbished office.  When Trent and Jennifer and their children head back to Texas, they will leave with the lived knowledge that at least one church really did welcome the homeless. 

And, given some of God’s generous rain, we will have a most beautiful golden carpet of poppies around St. Francis’ feet.

I have always insisted that we have a category of the church budget on the income side labeled “FAITH.”  It is placed there in trust that God will open doors unseen – doors invisible to the economic eye of the finance committee when they gather to put on their green eyeshades and reckon with the hard, cold reality of our present circumstances.  We need to allow for at least a smidgen of irrational exuberance, for that is what God’s grace is.  With St. Paul, we trust in things unseen, for hope we dared not even dream of. The same hope of those bedraggled Hebrew refugees returning from Babylonian captivity.

Each Sunday we gather around this table with love for one another, in hope that God’s irrational exuberance might anoint us from head to foot with the priceless ointment of grace, poured out to overflowing.

We leave the doors of this place in the same hope that we, let loose in the world, might be the sacramental embodiment of
God’s irrational exuberance.  Grace with no “off switch.”  Fine ointment to heal our bruised world.

And how did Nikki turn out?  The last we had heard was that after having a child out of wedlock, she had found a stable, responsible fellow who was the store manager at one of the chain drugstores up north, in Seattle, I believe. And married him.  And in my book that counts as an “A” grade.   

Yes, Easter is coming.  And with Mary and her jar of costly ointment, we best get ready for it.  Irrational exuberance is the order of the day.  Amen

Isaiah 43:16-21; Psalm 126; Philippians 3:4b-14; John 12:1-8

Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year C, 2019

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

Preached at St. Francis Episcopal Mission, San Bernardino

When I was a young boy and I would insist that other kids were far better off than I – “Jimmy doesn’t have to mow the lawn. He doesn’t have to waste his whole Saturday.  How come I have to?  He has a much better family.”  My father would always say, “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.”  I wasn’t sure, in my tender years, what that meant.  For one thing, I knew it meant that I would have to mow the grass and I better get to it.  Otherwise my whole Saturday would be shot.  The same with washing the car.  Only years later would I have a more adequate understanding of my father’s saying.

Joshua 5:9-12; Psalm 32; II Cor. 5:16-21; Luke 15:1-3,11b-32
Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year C, 2019
The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney
Preached at St. Francis Episcopal Mission, San Bernardino

The genius of Jesus is that he didn’t teach by the logic of rational argument.  No syllogisms for him.  He taught by story, sayings and by example.  Today, we get one of the most familiar stories in all of Scripture.  My friend, Paul Clasper, would say that if we had lost almost all of our written scriptural heritage but we had only a few bits left, this story being one of them, would have had enough to understand the whole thing.  We would have had enough to redeem the world.

So, we have this story of a father and two sons.  One son is sick and tired of mowing the lawn every Saturday.  He’s, like, “I’m outta here. If Jimmy doesn’t have to mow the lawn, why should I?  It’s stupid.”  So, he goes to his father and demands that he give him his half of the livelihood.  And he will just leave, thank you.  So, the father, in sadness hands him a bag of coins, half of the inheritance and bids the younger son farewell.  As the boy disappears down the road, a tear rolls down the father’s cheek.

The boy, gleefully heads off to big city where he will never have to mow the grass.  In fact, he will never have anymore irksome chores.  He heads off to a mythical far country where every day is nothing but a big party – just like those commercials for Carnival Cruises, or the excitement of a Morongo Valley Casino.  No one mows the lawn as far as he can see.  For this kid, the whole world is a twenty-four/seven party.  He’s the high roller at the table.  Glamorous women cluster around him and the action is hot. 

But as the days roll on, like the die at the craps table, his bag of coins isn’t so full anymore.  As he gets down to the nubbins, he begins to wonder why he’s always the one having to buy the beer.  Where are those other Big-Time Spenders?  In a flash, he’s out of chips.  Outta money.  Outta luck.  The barkeep is now insisting the tab be paid.  And all the beautiful women are standing around some other guy.

As hunger settles in and he wakes stiff and cold on a park bench, it’s beginning to dawn on him – something his father said about the grass on the other side of the fence.  He comes to his senses in a far country that is cold and inhospitable, the faint glow of flashing neon a few blocks away.  A far country that is little better than death itself.  Diving through Dumpsters behind the casino restaurant, all he ends up with is stale, dried-out, tough pizza crusts and food poisoning.  Retching in the weeds, it dawns on him that even the lowliest of his father’s servants had it better than this.

He comes to himself in a far country and doesn’t like what he is finding.  All is desolation and abandonment.

In America, we now find ourselves in a Far Country, a country that many of us don’t recognize.

The opioid crisis ravaging our nation is certainly desolation and abandonment.  Addiction is a very far country.  We have abandoned our most vulnerable to the tender mercies of Perdue Chemical and their ilk.  Last year we had some forty-seven thousand deaths from opioid overdose, though various stats give somewhat different numbers – but it’s in that ballpark.  More than all the years of the entire Vietnam War.

I heard from an Episcopal colleague in West Virginia that Bishop Mike Klusmeyer had called all the West Virginia clergy and laity together for a conference on opioids.  He has mandated that every parish will have the antidote to opioids, Naltrexone, on site with some people in each congregation trained to administer it.  It will stop an overdose cold in its tracks.  Instantly.

Now, here comes that other brother, you know the responsible one.  The older one who always did his chores without complaint.  Yeah, the one who was always willing to step in and mow the damn grass and do whatever.  Mr. Responsibility.  If we’re honest with ourselves, there’s a bit of that stuffed-shirt, self-righteous brother in each of us.  I know that brother lurks in me.  That’s right – I am the older brother.  And I’m sure my brother Tom would say at times I could be a real jerk.

In the Episcopal clergy, I discovered we had a number of those older brothers who stayed home and mowed the grass.  Now what these “jerks” said was, “Bishop, why should we bother?  If we’re going to save them from this one-time overdose, won’t they just go out and do the same thing all over again?  Why bother?  We’re just wasting our time.”  Classic, Blame the Victim.  Older brother types can really be insufferable. Why save them?   Really!?  What part of the gospel didn’t you understand?

Yet Today, Tomorrow, and the Next Day

Year C, 2nd Sunday of Lent

Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Psalm 27:10-18;
Philippians 3:17-4:1; Luke 13:31-35

Preached March 17, 2019

St. Francis Episcopal Mission, San Bernardino

The Rev. John C. Forney

The other day over coffee and donuts an old friend brought up some of his recent theological explorations.  I’ll call him Sam to protect the innocent and the confused.  Sam mentioned a number of people he was reading or had looked into.  He found it all very confusing and disturbing.  My take on Sam’s theological inquiry was that it was interesting, and certainly such armchair discussions are a pleasant diversion, but I didn’t find that they got me much of anywhere.  I said that as an Episcopalian (he was one also), I believed that theology should be sacramental if it is worth considering.

You remember what a sacrament is.  It’s the visible sign of an unseen grace, of an unseen mystery.  Any theology worth its salt should manifest in some way that the Power which moves us all should bring about a greater expression of the kingdom of God in the visible world.  It should manifest itself in changed lives, a greater and a more tender mercy. 

Karl Barth did indeed write many volumes of Church Dogmatics.  Ponderous, indeed.  Yet Karl Barth had a ministry within the jail of his city.  To my mind, his outreach to some of society’s most misfortunate validated his theology. 

There’s the story about Karl Barth’s entrance into heaven.  Upon his arrival he notices a huge, a ginormous crowd, awaiting his arrival.  Barth asks if all this hoo-ha is in recognition of his massive theological production.  “Oh no,” the MC says.  “We forgave you that long ago.”  “No,” she said.  “We are here in recognition of the countless hours you spent with the worst of the worst – to honor the sermons you gave Sunday after Sunday, and the comfort you provided over the years to the inmates in Basel Prison.” 

To sum up: What does your theology lead you to do for your sisters and brothers, for our Mother Earth?  If nothing, it’s all worthless fluff.  Even if there are fourteen or fifteen volumes of it.

“Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today, tomorrow and the next day…”  This is what Jesus told his hostile interlocutors.  You go tell that old fox Herod that this is my business.  “Today, tomorrow, and the next day…”

And these words of Jesus must also be our mindset.  “Today, tomorrow, and the next day…”  we must be about the business of what my friend Ed Bacon calls, “Turning the human race into the human family.”  The kindom of God is the business of Christians every day.  It’s about wholeness and restoration.  Irenaeus tells us that the “glory of God is a man, is a woman, is a people fully alive.”  Yes, I’ve expanded his thought here.  But it comports with the meaning.

Note, I said “kindom of God.”  That’s because in the mind of Christ we are all kin to one another. 

Indeed, we are all kin one to another.  That is why the blasé, dismissive attitude of our president towards this week’s killings in New Zealand I find so abhorrent.  The position of the new – maybe it’s not so new after all – white nationalism that we must fear and demonize all those different from ourselves is tearing at the fabric of our nation.  No, Donald Trump did not pull the trigger in a mosque in New Zealand.  A deranged and twisted mind did that.  But as Rabbi Chuck Diamond of the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh – you remember, the place of that terrible massacre of innocent Jewish worshippers — insists, “Words matter.”  To Trump’s assertion that he didn’t know enough to comment, again the rabbi counters, “You know enough to know it’s wrong.”

Today, tomorrow and the next day we are called to stand for what is right and to call “wrong” what it is, flat out “wrong.”  Words do matter, Mr. President.

When our president opines in a freewheeling, unscripted moment, “I think Islam hates us.  There’s something, something there… a tremendous hatred of us.  There’s unbelievable hatred of us.” – that is when Christians should have been crying to the heavens, “NO, NO, NO.  This is not America!  This is not who we are as people of faith. This is not what Jesus teaches.”

This president has tapped into a global market for hatred.  A market spawned and fed by the worst of the internet. 

Today, tomorrow and the next day — that is the time for our witness to what we believe in the Jesus movement and what we’re about.

Chris Matthews, good Catholic that he is, brought on his Hardball program Friday those of other faiths to raise a common voice of denunciation.

Khizr Khan, a Gold Star father, the Muslim whose son was killed in Iraq, set the record straight.  “The shooter in his manifesto wrote, ‘Trump is the symbol of a renewed white identity and common purpose.’”  Yes, Mr. President, words do matter.  Your words matter.  Mr. Khan, speaking of Trump’s hateful rhetoric, continued, “How wrong he is.  There are over ten thousand Muslim soldiers serving in the United States Army that have taken the oath to defend the Constitution and this country…How wrong he is…like on every issue.  This is a politically expedient person.  He is a ship without rudder.  That is why we see all these investigations.  My only concern is how would we recover from this hate and division?”  Chris Matthews’ answer was, “Well, we’re talking about it.”

That’s where we all must start.  We must be talking about it.  Today, Tomorrow and the next day.  And whoever that “Fox” may be, whatever powers and principalities that pejorative stands for, we Christians must be in the public square standing for what is right. Otherwise we’ll have lost our saltiness.  Good for nothing but…well, we probably won’t be tramped underfoot, we’ll just be ignored.

Today, tomorrow and the next day, whether it is with a beaten traveler by the side of a road leading from Jerusalem to Jericho or at the shore of a Galilean lake, we are called to be a transformational people. Listen again to St. Paul:

Ever dying, here we are alive. Called nobodies, yet we are ever in the public eye.  Though we have nothing with which to bless ourselves, yet we bless many others with true riches.  Called poor, yet we possess everything worth having.”[1]

Today, tomorrow and the next day, here we are alive, blessing others with true riches.  And so, we begin the conversation.  In church.  In the supermarket checkout line.  And in our legislatures.  Silence is not golden.  Silence is death. 

The day after I had left West Virginia, a company began dismantling the Weirton Steel Mill, about twelve miles up the road from where I had been staying.  Work was proceeding slowly but safely until someone got a “bright idea.”  Now whenever someone on my construction crew got a “bright idea,” I would tell the crew to consider just one question, a question fraught with potential legal and economic implications.  The question?  The question was: “What could possibly go wrong?”

Apparently, no one ever asked that question in Weirton at the worksite, or if it had been asked, no one carefully considered the possible answers.  The “bright idea” was, why don’t we just blow it up?  Right!  Blow up the whole thing! And I’m thinking, “Now, what could possibly go wrong?  Sure, blow it up.  And maybe half the town?”

As a monstrous dust cloud began to subside, it became clear that plenty had gone wrong.  For blocks around, windows were shattered and houses were knocked off their foundations.  Worse yet, this cloud was potentially full of all sort of toxins and asbestos and God only knew what else.  Houses, lawns playgrounds were covered by the soot.  It was something out of 9/11 all over again.

As I scrolled down through some of the comments that followed the online news article itself, what surprised me was the anger directed against those who complained, or sent off air samples to the Feds to be analyzed for the sort of stuff that could kill a person.  Don’t say anything.  It will make our president and our town look bad.  It will get us a bad reputation.  Never mind the children and old people.  Never mind those most vulnerable to any released contaminants.

Today, tomorrow and the next day Christians are called to put health and public safety first over the protection of some idiot with a “bright idea” that may have destroyed several city blocks and ruined the health of hundreds.  Christians are called to raise a ruckus when well-being is at stake.  No matter whose reputation might be damaged.

While you and I are compelled to raise a ruckus, we are, more than that, called to raise hope and possibility.  Healing is always the order of the day.  We’re here to more than just point out the problem.  We’re here to be a solution, or at least part of a solution.  That’s what a whole lot of Christians and other people of faith — and also some of no faith — did in Pomona several weeks ago.  The “Pomona Reawakening Conference” brought many residents of Pomona and several surrounding cities together to think about what “Engaged Compassion” might mean for a city.  Think about our schools, employment, policing, the environment, city services, clean neighborhoods, safety. 

Well, folks did think about such.  And this original conference has grown legs.  My good friend Dick put up with more dysfunction, distraction by shiny objects and the chasing after rabbits to get this thing organized – well, let me just say – this project would have tried the patience of a saint!  Meeting after planning meeting, Dick was lucky if even two or three in any group would have been at the previous planning meeting.  Or any other planning meeting, for that matter!  Yes, today, tomorrow and the next day…Dick kept at it.  And the results, when it all came together at Temple Beth Israel on a cold Saturday morning, were absolutely heartwarming.  Listening to the two keynote speakers – there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.  The workshops following lunch propelled action.  And from that beginning has come the continued gathering of a bunch of folks bent on the renewal of that city through the ways of engaged compassion.  The thing has absolutely grown legs.  All key players are now engaged.  This common effort is a joy to behold.

This is the sort of work, today, tomorrow and the next day, that brings blessing to our living.  In it Christ is to be found.  This Lent, today, tomorrow and the next day…let us be in the thick of God’s action for restoration and wholeness.

As I told my younger son who had the idea of “doing something” about opioid addiction in West Virginia, “Well, this is another fine mess you’ve gotten me into — a most fine, godly mess.”  And that, my friends, is our summons.  To find, or create fine, godly messes that bring true riches and blessing.  Today, tomorrow and the next day.   Amen.

---

[1] The New Testament in Modern English, J.B Phillips 1960, 1972 J. B. Phillips. Administered by The Archbishops’ Council of the Church of England. II Cor. 6:9-10.

The word this Lent must be, “Take off your shoes, you’re standing on holy ground.”  Wisdom such as Eddie’s is truly Holy Ground.  What Eddie had to share is no different from that of the great Jewish theologian, Martin Buber.  God is RELATIONSHIP.    

Exodus 3:1-15; Psalm 63:1-8; I Cor. 10:1-13; Luke 13:1-9
Third Sunday in Lent, Year C, 2004
The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney
Preached at St. Francis Episcopal Mission, San Bernardino

I received an invitation from a friend this week on LinkedIn.  I usually don’t use that platform – I’m already busy enough with everything else.  However, since I had just seen him last night, I responded to his invitation.  Looking through LinkedIn, I came across a video of Eddie Jaku, a 98-year-old survivor of the Holocaust.  He was speaking on what it takes to live a good life, the secret he has learned.  Curious about what a person who had experienced the worst of what humans can do to one another, I listened.

You must not hate.  You say, “I don’t like this person,” but you must not hate.  Hate is a disease.  It destroys first your enemy, but you also.  It destroys you.  Hate.  They ask me what is my secret.  My secret is a good wife and friendship.  Friendship you cannot buy.  When I was eight years old my father says to me, “Eddie, there is more pleasure in giving than taking.”  I thought he’s coocoo.  Now that I have children, grandchildren and great grandchildren – what you give, you get back – if nothing, you get nothing back.  So, this is important.  I want to teach you, all the people who are younger, if you don’t learn from us there’ll be no future.[1]

You can find it on YouTube.  As I sat there listening to this old Jew sharing the wisdom that has redeemed the most excruciating of experiences, I realized that I was on holy ground.  Through the profound words of this man spoke another as well.  The very same voice Moses heard from an incandescent bush, “I AM WHO I AM.” In an instant, listening in my chair, I was filled with profound awe and an overwhelming joy.  Joy, that this one survivor was now sharing with me and all others on LinkedIn, a truth that has the power to set us free.  Free from the hatred that produced the carnage in a New Zealand Mosque, free from the hatred that floods our airwaves and daily discourse.  “Hate first destroys your enemy, but also you.”

The word this Lent must be, “Take off your shoes, you’re standing on holy ground.”  Wisdom such as Eddie’s is truly Holy Ground.  What Eddie had to share is no different from that of the great Jewish theologian, Martin Buber.  God is RELATIONSHIP.  The gospel of John puts it a bit differently, “God is LOVE.  Those who abide in Love abide in God and God in them.”

To speak of an experience so sublime, so profound…there are no adequate words.  All fails.  That is the quandary of all who in a moment find themselves before the Presence.  The word, “God,” seems inadequate, for in as soon as we’ve uttered the sound, our mind is flooded with images of something less than…less than the present, vivid experience.  Less than RELATIONSHIP that pervades all that is, binding us together as one.  A relationship Jesus called, “Abba” – or Daddy.

We’ve seen this divine reality in the coming together of New Zealanders after that tragic mosque shooting.  As mourners gathered to bury the dead, this is the witness of Imam Gamal Fouda of Al Noor Mosque, one of the two attacked:

“This terrorist sought to tear our nation apart with an evil ideology that has torn the world apart — but instead we have shown that New Zealand is unbreakable,”

Take off your shoes, you’re on Holy Ground.  Indeed!

When in the presence of profound grief, silence is often the only possible response.  Such grief as my friend from West Virginia reported several days ago concerning a suicide of a young girl, Samantha – known to those who loved her as Sammy.  I knew her step-mother Michelle.  She was often at the farm, and she had catered the lunch for our House of Hope community forum in Wellsburg.  The girl had been depressed for some time, I gathered, and ended her life by consuming the entire bottle of antidepressant medication.  What led up to this, I don’t know.  But suicide is rampant now amongst the young.  It is epidemic among our older adults who feel they no longer have a purpose in life.  Suicide is doubly prevalent in depressed areas, like, the entire middle of the nation, like, in our urban areas with twenty percent youth unemployment.  Scott, our development officer on West Virginia, says that the community has surrounded Michelle and the father Joe with a love that can only be said to be divine.  This is the strength within rural communities that is so unique.  Last Thursday many gathered at the Forney Farm just to be together with the Sammy’s family and friends.  To have a cry, to tell stories, to open a beer or two.  Just to be together.

Take of your shoes, that little clubhouse on the farm was Holy Ground that evening.

Our son Christopher reports that among the last graduating class of PhD students at Yale, no one got a tenure-track job.  No one!  In the new gig economy, all are disposable.  To view the waste of discarded lives, to witness the despair of young and old, is to stand speechless on Holy Ground.  Knowing there will be no answer, we still ask, “Why?”  O Lord, are all these not precious in your sight?  And, if we’re attentive, if we’re engaged in holy listening, we ought to hear the only response there is: “Pay attention.  See what’s going on.  Do something.  You there, start something.  Begin a new beginning.  You, go to pharaoh and tell him…  You!  You!”

The one thing we do know is that an endless stream of the idiot tube is not the answer.  Whether it’s Fox News or MSNBC, research has shown that seniors who spend more than three hours before the TV are on a fast track to dementia.  I would have suspected that one of those two outlets, more than the other, would have been directly connected with dementia and Alzheimer’s.  But that’s a political guess.  A life of service and friends will place you on Holy Ground. 

We substitute the fake and plastic for what truly nourishes.  To my mind, Las Vegas is the epitome of the ersatz – the symbol of our cultural junk banquet.  Utter malnourishment.  Built out in the middle of a desert with fake lakes and mindless entertainment, — all substituting for real life.  Glitter, neon and hype. 

One trip I took quite a while with a business partner and his wife was to Las Vegas – Yeah, this really was a business trip.  Really!  However, I must say that I did give my secretary a start when I told her that we would be home late because we would be walking.  We lost the car to the slots.  There was a long silence on the other end of the phone.  “Just kidding, Lacy,” I quickly added to relieve her anxiety.

Now let me tell you about real temptation in Sin City.  When I noticed that the band Chicago was playing at the Stardust, I was sorely tempted to stay the weekend and catch the show.  There’s temptation indeed.  The get-thee-behind-me-Satan-and-push-harder kind of temptation. But sanity and responsibility won out.  I did make it home on schedule. 

There’s much to find that is disturbing in Las Vegas, but what caught my attention was a group of several people with large signs over by the crowd watching the pirate battle at one of the hotels.  One of their signs loudly proclaimed “Jesus saves from Hell.”  A second sign was some other theological warning of dire consequences.  Maybe it wasn’t so much the theology – for Jesus does indeed save us from the emptiness, futility, and purposelessness that I would interpret Hell to be.  It was more their demeanor.  These religious scolds were certainly not the heart of the Beatitudes — In that moment I felt embarrassed for the church.  No evocation from these folks of the sublime or even fearsome awe of the Holy.  No blessed tenderness of that Good Shepherd or of a Mother Hen who would gather us under her wing.  Where is the Daddy who envelopes us in loving arms?  How many people, through our vindictive, judgmental attitudes, has Christianity damaged over the years, I wondered.  This is not the Gospel.  The Gospel means Good News.  This is Bad News.  Very Bad News.  Who would take of their shoes for this sort of hateful nonsense?  No one!  This is not the reality Moses encountered in a desert wasteland.

Some Sundays when I look out over the congregation coming forward at the Eucharist, I am profoundly moved as my mind goes from one to another.  We each humbly bring our frayed humanity before the Mystery of Life, seeking nourishment for the days ahead.  Some struggle with life-threatening illnesses, some bring the concern for a child or grandchild.  Some bring an ineffable joy she dares not mention.  But there we all are, standing on the most holy of grounds – our love for one another and for the One who has brought us thus far.

In Exodus we have one of the most profound proclamations of Good News in all of scripture.  Moses, a wanted murderer on the lam, is accosted by a Love behind all and within all.  A force intrinsic to the entire created order.   By the glint of something in a bush, something seen out of the corner of his eye.  A nondescript desert shrub burst into a blaze of fire and Moses’ life is permanently changed – it, too, burst into a blaze of fire. Consumed and not consumed, in ways he could never have imagined.  His identity is no longer that of a murderer, no longer that of an escaped slave.  His identity is entwined with the liberating power of the same Almighty who created out of nothing the stuff of all that is.  He is sent back to bring freedom and a renewed identity to his people.  I AM WHO I AM has hijacked his life to this most incredible end.

And of course, we all know the story.  After some initial protests that I AM WHO I AM has gotten the wrong guy for the job, Moses does descend down the slopes of Mount Horeb into the den of Pharaoh to demand in the name of God Almighty, “Let my people go!”  And before there before Pharaoh, Moses again is standing on Holy Ground.

A simple glint, the voice of a survivor by chance caught on LinkedIn, the tragedy of yet another suicide…in a moment we’re transported beyond ourselves to Holy Ground.

Maybe silence is the first and most appropriate impulse.  As Paul Tillich enjoins his reader,

Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: “You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!”[2]

In that moment, in a blink of an eye, you are standing on Holy Ground.  All is inalterably changed.  Forever.

This Lent, take time to savor the Holy Ground moments that come to our living.  Let us take courage to incline our ears to their summons — to heed their call that leads to the broken in spirit and to those who weep.  Send us, O Lord, to the brokenhearted and also to those too full of good things, too full of themselves for their own good.  Let us learn to let go of our own inflated selves that we might possibly be put to some good purpose. 

But, in those moments – and you’ll know them when they come — for God’s sake and for yours, take off your shoes. You’re standing on Holy Ground.   Amen.

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[1] Eddie Jaku, “The Secret of a Good Life,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdbxJKijn5U

[2] Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948).